Name of the clade of archaea plus eukarya proposed at: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00717/full. Much better term than prokaryote as that is not a clade. Let's hope it catches on!
Not really dedicated to open source course material, nor to free courses...
The "Open" in its name only made sense in the 60's, when it was founded, nowadays, there isn't much about this institution that is very different compared to traditional Oxbridge. "Cheap more online university" would be a more adequate name for it.
A system that would truly live up to the name "Open" in the year 2020 is the one described at the ideal university by Ciro Santilli.
Wikipedia even says that the initial focus was on broadcasting learning material on television and radio, so what happened to that now that we have an even more powerful on-demand tool called Internet!
They even created their own MOOC website, FutureLearn. But www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/ mentions:OMG. God why.
The course content is still free to access, but it’s only available for the duration of the course, and for two weeks after it ends.
A few open sources at: www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses. The 5-hour course on particle physics says it all. Stated as of 2023 at www.open.ac.uk/about/open-educational-resources/openlearn/free-learning:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj0rbafFBak What's an Open University Degree Like? by Luke Cutforth (2021) mentions that it is more autodidactic/online, and it encourages part time learning.
youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=99 Open University - How does it work? by Matt Greg Vlogs (2017) shows that they do have their own custom institutional material. And it is not open???? Please. youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=222 mentions that there is no entry exam, and you can change your courses at any time, that is good at least.
Israel apparently also created their own version in the 70's inspired by the British one: Open University of Israel. Same story it seems.
As a phisicist once amazingly put it in a talk Ciro watched:
It all depends on how much energy you have to probe nature with. Previously, we thought protons were elementary particles. But then we used more energy and found that they aren't.If some alien race had even less energy, they might not know about electrons at all, and could think that anyons are actually elementary.Being an "elementary particle" is always a possibly temporary label.
Goes along: if you could control your life multiple times to be perfect, you would eventually get tired of paradise, and you would go further and further into creating uncertain worlds with some suffering, until you would reach the current real world.
Very similar to The Matrix (1999) when Agent Smith talks about the failed Paradise Matrix shown at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qs3GlNZMhY:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
The courses are highly open, almost everything is given publicly except solutions, many of which are given to teachers only. Well done!
Past exam papers index: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/pastpapers/
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/
- www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/part1a.html year 1
- Michaelmas term
- www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Databases/
- past exams:
- questions: public www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/pastpapers/t-Databases.html
- solutions: paywalled
- slides: public e.g. www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Databases/djg-materials/databases_2223_1to4-B.pdf
- problem sheets:
- questions: public e.g. www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Databases/djg-materials/supervision-1.html
- solutions: not available
- past exams:
- www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Databases/
- Lent term
- Discrete mathematics
- problem sheets:
- question: public e.g. www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/DiscMath/solutions/DiscMaths1_Sols.pdf
- solutions: public e.g. www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/DiscMath/solutions/DiscMaths1_Sols.pdf
- problem sheets:
- ALgorithms 1
- lecture notes: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Algorithm1/2022-2023-stajano-algs1-handout.pdf
- problem sheet:
- questions: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Algorithm1/2022-2023-stajano-algs1-exercises.pdf
- solutions: not available
- www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/Algorithm1/
- Discrete mathematics
- Michaelmas term
It is good to see that top-universities is still keeping up with it's main purpose: spontaneous eugenics:
Examples:
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact






